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Daniel VS. Childhood: Godzilla: The Series

I played a lot of Game Boy games when I was a kid, and I never got any good at them. Fifteen years later, I’m revisiting these games so that I can finally achieve victory. This is Daniel VS. Childhood.

One would think that it would be difficult to take the reins of the most powerful monster in the world. But it’s not, because you spend most of that time lording your powers over all the tanks, copters and lesser monsters that get in your way. The only learning curve that Godzilla: The Series would have is if a dog or a lizard tried to play it, because they don’t have thumbs. If you can turn on your Game Boy Color, you can beat Godzilla: The Series.

Truly terrible movies make you feel like the people who released them are trying to sneak something past you. You’re acting as the guard of your taste in pop culture, and they’re the suspicious-looking moving bush that’s scurrying through your perimeter. The biggest thing the 1998 American Godzilla tried to do that irks me is make me believe that the creators of it actually liked the character of Godzilla. But if they thought that they could make us think that they were sincere by throwing in a couple half-hearted nods to the original film (Japanese people! Japanese words! What an homage!), they need to move onto their next trick, which would probably be stacking up a bunch of iguanas in a Godzilla-sized trench coat. Godzilla is the product of someone saying “Jurassic Park made this amount of money, and Independence Day made this amount of money. If we put them together, we’d make THIS amount of money.”

Godzilla: The Series is spent angling Godzilla’s head to spit fireballs at things. The game moves him forward, so all you have to do is aim. Usually, I hate this kind of game, because I end up being forced off of cliffs by the constantly-moving camera, but in Godzilla: The Series, there are no cliffs or jumps. It’s just flat land, followed by more flat land. The only time Godzilla halts is when a boss monster appears, and even then, you just shoot indiscriminate fireballs until the thing explodes. It probably would have been even easier to kill the giant bee/electrical something/squid with legs if you’d just let Godzilla trample over it.

There is a story, made up of the cast of the cartoon show saying things to each other, but none of it is worth reading. Why waste the time that you could spend moving Godzilla’s head up and down? What importance do they have in a game that will not let you die? Your health bar expands every time that you score another 5000 points, so you become eternal by the middle of the second level.

I almost feel like the universe gave me this win, after Bladeleft me to die on the side of a road. And while I’ll gladly accept it, it’s not the time to start thinking highly of myself. If I was ten, this would be a moment where I’d think Well, maybe I AM good at video games! Now, I can’t be sure.